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Paper presented at the Symposium: Bringing Together China and the West: A Symposium to Celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the Chinese University of Hong Kong — The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library. Hong Kong, 10 February 2023., Traditionally, historiography attributes a decisive role to the printing press in initiating modernity in Europe, although scholars are still reluctant to admit that it was not an exclusively European enterprise. In the mid-sixteenth century, when the first Jesuit missionaries entered China, they were deeply struck by the vibrancy of the Chinese publishing world, the low cost of books and their wide distribution and did not fail to account for it in the reports they periodically sent to Europe. In several books on exhibition at the Library of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, one can find a few such references. Let us consider, for example, Juan González de Mendoza's Historia del las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres, del Gran Reyno de la China, the first book ever printed in Europe on the history of China, as well as Jean Baptiste Du Halde, The General History of China. Both Mendoza and Du Halde extoll the technical accuracy of the Chinese printing. Unfortunately, such sources have long circulated only among sinologists, but have had little impact on book historians. As has been rightly noted, until historians of the book in Europe become fully acquainted with the level of sophistication and complexity achieved by Chinese printers long before Gutenberg (Henry D. Smith, II, Japaneseness and the History of the Book, "Monumenta Nipponica," 53, 4, 1998, pp. 499-514:501-2), a true dialogue between book historians in Europe and book historians in China cannot take place. This presentation attempts to offer a contribution to the construction of this dialogue by looking at the Jesuit project of integrating the curriculum for access to the civil service in China, revisited from the perspective of book history. Although the project remained unfinished, the presence of Jesuit texts in Chinese in imperial and private library collections, as well as the numerous reprints, indicate that missionaries were able to interact fruitfully with Chinese literati, even at the cost of generating misunderstandings with respect to their initial intentions. A few cases in point will be shown. The presentation concludes with an invitation to adopt a less self-referential way of looking at cross-cultural contacts, and to examine these misunderstandings not as failures but as creative appropriations generating new knowledge.

Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica, N. 1 (2021)

This paper examines the predictions made by Chinese, Muslim and Jesuit astronomers of the eclipse of 21 June 1629 in Beijing, allegedly the event that determined Emperor Chongzhen's resolution to reform the calendar using the Western method. In order to establish the accuracy of these predictions, as reported at the time by the Chinese scholar and convert Xu Guangqi, we have compared them with an accurate reconstruction of the eclipse made at NASA. In contrast with current opinions, we argue that the prediction made by the Jesuits was indeed the most accurate. It was in fact instrumental in dissipating Chongzhen's doubts about the need to entrust Jesuit missionaries serving at the Chinese court with the task of reforming the calendar, leading to the first important scientific collaboration between Europe and China., Published by Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage